Speak no evil

February 19, 2006 — 11.00am

IT'S OFTEN the case that a lion need not bare its claws or its fangs - the sheer terror it instils is enough for it to get its way. In halting English, Sheik Mohamed Omran tells a parable in which the king of beasts kills a wolf that had evenly divided the food at a banquet. The lion then asks a fox to divide the food, and the wise fox gives the lion everything.

If Omran's English is difficult at times to follow, his message is clear. The outspoken sheik believes that Muslims, some fearful of being deported, are more than happy to join the Federal Government in criticising him for speaking his mind.

"The Government ride them for its own purposes because the Government doesn't want anyone to oppose it, and at the same time, they ride the Government . . ." he says, pointing to federal funding and appointments to various advisory committees.

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Not surprisingly, Muslim groups are divided over whether to embrace Omran in the hope he will temper his tongue, or cut him loose. His recent comments referring to Osama bin Laden as a "good man", questioning the involvement of Muslims in the London bombings, and his links to the Melbourne men charged with terror-related offences make him Australia's most controversial, and possibly most extreme, Muslim cleric.

A flashpoint will be next month's summit of imams, which rather ambitiously will try to develop a code of conduct aimed at limiting inflammatory sermons by Muslim clerics.

Mustapha Kara-Ali, a representative on a Federal Government reference group established to promote better understanding between Muslims and the broader community, is outraged that Omran may attend the summit.

He accuses the sheik's organisation, Ahlus Sunnah wal Jama'ah, of trying to recruit young, disaffected Muslims away from the mainstream.

Kara-Ali places Omran and his followers in the same minority Sunni sect as Abu Hamzi, the Islamist cleric recently jailed in Britain for soliciting murder and inciting racial hatred, and Abu Qatada, once described as Osama bin Laden's ambassador in Europe.

Others such as Sheik Fehmi Naji el-Imam, the general-secretary of the Board of Imams of Victoria, and the Islamic Friendship Association president, Keysar Trad, are wary of the sheik but believe it is better to try to work with him.

"Ostracising his group is counterproductive," warns Trad. "They need to be engaged."

Omran himself doesn't seem too concerned about the debate around him. He says he will attend the summit in late March and will speak his mind: "Either I talk what I feel is true, or I don't talk." Judging by his comments in this interview that means being critical of both John Howard and Muslim leaders.

The Prime Minister, he says, "brought all the trouble to the country and we try to solve the problems, cleaning his mess behind him. Then he blames us when the clean is not complete. It is your mess, it's not ours!"

If many Australians discovered the country's Muslim community only after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, then most first heard of Omran in July last year after Howard attacked him over his comments about al-Qaeda chief bin Laden and for questioning if Muslims were behind the London bombings.

Omran had suggested the 2001 attacks in New York and Washington were "orchestrated by someone within the American Government or helped by them".

He told The Sunday Age that his views about September 11 were recorded 18 months before Howard's criticism and that the edited television broadcast of them had misrepresented what he had said.

"When I said, 'He's a good man', I talked about his behaviour, his helping the needy, how many projects he made for the needy in Sudan here, there. But when we went to his radical issues I said, 'Who made bin Laden as he is now? CIA used to help him make these holes in the mountains.' I talked about all of that. It wasn't only Osama bin Laden is a great man and that's the end of the story. And I said my advice to you if he is that huge and he's that strong - go and have peace with him.

"Really, at the bottom of my heart I was shocked that the Prime Minister went that far following every word of mine and trying to answer it. It was a joke, really. Even . . . if I made that comment, this is make me a radical? Maybe politically I'm radical but you don't see a radical sheik. This is my view as an Australian . . . this has nothing to do with me as a sheik. Keep saying about someone (is) 'radical, radical' and he will be radical."

Omran, looking tired behind an imposing beard, picks at his food as he answers questions over lunch at the home of his media adviser, Mustafa Kocak. He's often animated, and quick with a rhetorical question.

He glances at the chicken pieces on the table and says he hopes the food isn't too strange. "It is radical chicken," he jokes.

Shortly after the interview, a DVD called Painful Deceptions arrives for me at The Sunday Age. The sender does not identify him or herself and there is no note. The DVD questions the official findings of the 9/11 Commission, suggesting a conspiracy in which explosives were set in the World Trade Centre towers and a drone aircraft was flown into the Pentagon. Last September's edition of Mecca News, where Omran is the editor-in-chief, raised the same questions. Kocak denies sending the DVD, as does Omran, who says that everything he does is up front.

Further attention was focused on the sheik and the Ahlus Sunnah wal Jama'ah Association, last November when it was revealed that six of the nine Melbourne men charged with terror-related offences were linked to him.

The men had attended his sparse warehouse-like prayer hall in Brunswick before following the reportedly more extreme Abdul Nacer Benbrika, who was among those charged.

Omran says he cannot understand why security agencies apparently watched the men for 18 months before acting. He believes they should have been hauled in and given warnings. He says ASIO and police had told him they did not have the power to act earlier. "I don't believe in that. You can see there's a fishy smell behind it," he says. Later, he adds: "Everyone is saying that there is an agenda behind it to get the Prime Minister as a hero saving the nation. It is a political issue."

He calls those arrested "children" and says they are "so young, so naive, they don't know much about life or these things. They think if they go to the park and talk as they used to do, they are hiding from the police and the police doesn't know about them. This is how much naive they are."

Like the riots in Cronulla, the arrests stemmed, he believes, from what he calls the hot and dirty atmosphere created by the media's reporting of terrorism. By way of illustrating the fear, he says a security intelligence officer recently told him about a woman who felt shaky simply by sitting near a bearded man on a train.

Omran confirms he had learnt of a plan by Muslim convert Jack Roche to bomb diplomatic missions just before the 2000 Olympic Games and had stopped it by going to ASIO.

Roche was later jailed for plotting with al-Qaeda to blow up the Israeli embassy in Canberra. Omran still has regular meetings with ASIO. "We talk about everything."

HIS family in Amman, Jordan, hoped he would study medicine, but Omran was determined to learn more about his religion and attended the Islamic University of Medinah in Saudi Arabia. He studied Islam and Arabic, then chose the dawah - or call to Islam - coming to Australia in the mid-1980s after teaching in Fiji. He married Khadijah Johnston, a Muslim convert and the sister of Liverpool soccer legend Craig Johnston. They have nine children.

Omran worked in a mosque in Wollongong where he stayed for three years, before establishing Ahlus Sunnah wal Jama'ah Association and launching a Muslim magazine in 1989. He settled in Melbourne the following year.

The association now operates in three states and describes itself as a mainstream Muslim organisation. It runs the Islamic Information and Support Centre of Australia and publishes Mecca News, "a breath of fresh air in the field of media and journalism for Muslims in Australia".

Critics say that while the name Ahlus Sunnah wal Jama'ah suggests it is a Sunni Muslim organisation, in reality the group practises the strict fundamentalist stream of Salafism identified with bin Laden and other radicals.

Mustapha Kara-Ali, a youth representative on the Federal Government's reference group, says Ahlus Sunnah wal Jama'ah is a fringe group with beliefs that have been refuted by hundreds of religious scholars, and is in conflict with Sunni Islam, which covers about 85 per cent of the Muslim population.

Kara-Ali says: "When Omran stands up and says bin Laden is a good man, he says that for reasons because he has a lot at stake because bin Laden and Omran belong to the same movement and have got the same spiritual leaders.

"They've got the same source, the same books, the same leaders, same everything. They are not part of any global, international established networks. (It's) very ironic they say they don't play politics because they're the kings of politics."

Keysar Trad says Omran's group distinguishes itself from the rest of the community and represents a minority of a few thousand people nationally. Its followers range from conservative to ultra-conservative.

Kocak, the sheik's media adviser, maintains the association's main agenda is to pursue the "correct teachings" of the prophet Muhammad and to "correct misunderstandings".

Omran also denies that his and the association's views are anything other than mainstream and is scathing about his fellow imams, saying most are not qualified in religious scholarship. He cites the example of an electrician who became an imam: "You know how to fix a wire but don't know how to fix the mind of a person . . ."

And he says Muslim organisations have done little to contribute to the community, despite receiving millions of dollars from the Federal Government and Saudi Arabia. The Australian Federation of Islamic Councils has "so much money, but we don't see this money". Where are the playgrounds, medical centres and sports facilities, he asks.

Omran believes the Cronulla riots in December were sparked by media reports and exposed the moral emptiness of today's youth.

"There is no belief in God any more, so they have to fill this with something," he says. "They bring in racism. They make the flag of the country as a god . . . people have to have a belief.

"The danger is to make that as religion, as something holy. It's not holy. We are all created from Adam, white or black, whatever we are. We come from dust and we'll turn to dust. If we teach our kids that, then there's no difference. There is no better colour. The value of the human is in two things, as Islam taught us, by his heart and his tongue. They are the best of you or the worst of you. That's it. Makes you something great or makes you something different."

Ironically, it is Omran's tongue that most concerns the leaders of Australia's Muslim community.

CV

BORN Amman, Jordan, in 1957

EDUCATION University of Medinah, Saudi Arabia

CAREER Left Jordan in 1983 to teach Islam and Arabic in Fiji. Met his British-born Australian wife, Khadijah Johnston, and continued to teach in Fiji until 1985 when he came to Australia and became a citizen. He worked in a mosque in Wollongong where he stayed for three years before deciding to lecture more widely. He formed the Ahlus Sunnah wal Jama'ah Association in Sydney in 1989 and started a Muslim magazine. He moved to the Michael Street, Brunswick, prayer hall in July 2000. The first of a series of controveries began in September 1993, when he was linked with an al-Qaeda terrorist cell based in Spain. He denied the link. But his comments about the London bombings, September 11 and links to people suspected of terrorist offences have kept him in the national spotlight.